Libertarians are Lazy

It’s hard to be a Republican. Your party expects you to keep track of a long list of seemingly unrelated issues and have the proper stand on each one of them. For example, drugs are bad if they are sold on the corner by people who don’t look like you, but they’re OK if they are sold by a business that is highly regulated and taxed by you. Obamacare is fine if it’s implemented by a Republican in Massachusetts, but bad if it’s implemented by a Democrat in Washington. And so on.

It’s just as difficult being a Democrat: Choice is Ok when deciding abortion, but not when you want to get your kid out of the government-run indoctrination centers we call public schools. Guns are bad if citizens own them, but good in the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats they call law enforcement officers. The hypocrisy is obvious and is found in every part of both parties.

Every time an election comes up, the ballot has a number of things that I must decide on. The repubs and dems have guides that show their members the proper way to vote. Such guides are necessary given the lack of principles in each party. There are other independent groups with guides that offer different advice. How is one to know what are the proper votes to cast?

On the other hand, voting with a libertarian mindset is easy. First, vote for neither of the duopoly parties. If there’s a Libertarian, vote for him if he seems to act in accordance with libertarian principles.. If not, vote for nobody.

As far as our direct-democracy referenda, I read each one carefully, and vote for the effect it will have on the size of government. If it makes government smaller, “yes”. Otherwise “no”. If a proposition promises to eliminate poverty/cancer/noisy eaters and all bad thoughts from all people but it raises my taxes one cent a year, it gets the big thumbs-down.

Living and voting by a single principle makes all decisions easier. That principle is called the “Non-Aggression Principle”, or NAP. It says that it is morally wrong to initiate violence against another person. Government is violence by its very nature, so anything that increases the power of government is, by its nature, immoral. Voting to increase government in any way means you are part of the problem. Voting to decrease government is the only moral action if you are so inclined to participate.